pepperoni pizza

This year, there were three winners of the Pittsburgh Brain Connectivity Competition: One from the Netherlands, one from Taiwan, and one from St. Louis, Missouri USA.

And speaking of St. Louis, perhaps the highlight of the awards ceremony this morning at the Human Brain Mapping meeting was an introductory talk by Washington University's Prof. David van Essen, comparing the thousand-year history of cartography of our planet, with the hundred-year history of cartography of our brain. Prof. van Essen pointed out that the unfolded surface area of each brain hemisphere is roughly equal to that of a thirteen-inch pizza, and that the size of each functionally specialized cortical area is about that of a slice of pepperoni.